Posts tagged advice

Welcome back to a grab-bag edition of Ask Massively. First up is reader Roy, who asked,
Do you have any kind of newsletter or weekly email on this site?
Nope, no newsletter or email blasts! But there are lots of easy ways to follow our work. If you want the whole shebang, you can follow us through...

Today's Ask Massively question comes from Kirk because he wanted to open up a can of worms all over the column apparently.
Why do people have to hate on World of Warcraft so much? I quit playing WoW about two years ago and never looked back, but that game encompassed the best gaming experience of ...

A reader named Gabe emailed Massively last year with two questions (I'm getting through all the emails -- I am!). I'll address the second one eventually, but let's do the first one today because it's something I love to talk about: open-world MMOs.
What happened to "open world" MMOs? I grew up wit...

David is angry. No, David is pissed. And he's right to be. He wrote to Ask Massively with the following rant:
Developers clearly see PvE instances as a key part of the MMO experience. So why do so many of them fail to ensure I can access this content with a solid group finder? I have been trying t...

A reader named Josh recently wrote to Massively to ask about the viability of a career in games journalism. He's not a kid with stars in his eyes; he's an adult who works for an elite tech company, and his dad is a published journalist himself. He once focused his MMO hobby into a livestreaming cha...

Karen Bryan is a seasoned MMORPG gamer and guildleader who cut her MMO teeth on EverQuest and went on to run guilds in Vanguard, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and beyond. That made her the perfect choice to pen Massively's Guild Counsel column, through which Karen dispensed advice to guild leaders, ...

Final Fantasy XIV is not World of Warcraft. We are not in urgent need of an ability squish after years of play; you hit level 50 with a pretty reasonable number of abilities. The fact that everything needs to be workable on a PlayStation 3 controller helps discourage button bloat, to boot. But you ...

Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.
Sometimes...

So I guess people are pretty excited about WildStar. Once again, all entries for this LFG column consist entirely of players looking for a guild in the upcoming WildStar, and they may just have the right idea.
If you're a guild leader looking to populate your guild with the smartest and possibly...

Playing a manipulative character is kind of a minefield because you wind up falling into one of two traps. The first possibility is that you wind up not being very good at it because you aren't very manipulative. This isn't a mark against you, as none of the hallmarks of manipulation is thought of ...

The other day, I came across one of those inspirational posters that takes a word and then uses each letter to spell out a quality that makes up the word. And it got me thinking about what words best describe the essence of a good guild leader. There are as many different types of guild leaders as ...

For this week's Ask Massively, longtime reader Avaera has asked us to do another round of "why we cover what we do," and I am happy to oblige. Avaera wrote,
Can I ask (with what I hope is genuine curiosity) what guidelines you generally try to follow when choosing which news stories to cover? I do...

Those crazy kids ... We sure hear a lot of frustrated cries for them to get off our Azerothian lawns. The usual scenario: The son or daughter of a relative or friend takes up playing the game. She's a great kid and all, and you're happy to make the occasional dungeon run with her -- it's just that ...

There are certain bits of roleplaying that I like to think of as mechanical. They're there, they're necessary, but they're not terribly interesting. They're like random battles in Bravely Default: kind of neat the first time, altogether forgettable all subsequent times, and never blessed with an ab...

There's a wave of new MMOs on the horizon, and with each one comes a surge of enthusiastic fans ready for launch day. Some are so excited that they want to hit the ground running by joining a guild before the game goes live. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of pre-launch guilds for each upcomi...

Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.
We're sti...

Dead is dead. I can't stand when comics endlessly bring back dead characters, I can't stand when shows bring back dead villains, and I can't stand when death is treated less like the final note and more like a brief inconvenience. If you want someone to come back from the dead, don't kill the chara...

With the arrival of EverQuest Next Landmark's alpha, the buzz is all about how the game is a fresh change from what we've been used to in MMOs. And actually, in some ways, it's a return to the roots of the MMO industry. But EQ Next Landmark is also redefining the whole concept of guilds, perhaps in...

It can be easy to forget how awesome MMO players are when we're knee-deep in troll-infested comment threads, but a note from a reader named Joshua this week served as the perfect perspective-reorientation:
I was helping my brother demo and clean his father-in-law's home today and stumbled upon wha...

A curious reader writes:
This isn't actually an advice question, more a curious query. I've noticed some topical overlap between the Drama Mamas column and the Officers' Quarters column on WoW Insider. Do you guys ever punt submissions over the fence to one another? What criteria should people us...